It was a pretty easy prediction to make in our October 2021 report on Process and Task Mining that more mining vendors would be acquired by larger process automation vendors. And right on cue Automation Anywhere acquired process mining vendor FortressIQ just days before Christmas. FortressIQ was founded in 2017 and had completed a Series B funding round in 2020 bringing its total funding to $46m. Though the price paid is so far undisclosed, it’s likely there was a decent multiple involved here.
Deep Analysis looked at FortressIQ closely in 2020 and you can read our report here – at the time we were impressed and liked the firm and product a lot. Yet what we have noticed in the press coverage of this deal is that FortressIQ is often referred to as a Process Mining vendor, akin to Celonis or Signavio. That is not correct, and in our nit-picky way that needs clarifying. FortressIQ is more accurately labeled as a Task Mining tool. This is not a tool that dregs for log data, rather it used Computer Vision to analyze the task and step reality at the screen level. To quote from our own report “There are alternate tools on the market that can examine log-level data in applications, and that can be very useful, but as of today there is little available to automate the observation of the human interactions with business applications. FortressIQ does that, and does it well.”
RPA vendors like Automation Anywhere focus on the automation of repetitive tasks, so this deal seems like a fit and valuable addition to the Automation Anywhere portfolio. Task Mining tools live in the shadow of Process Mining tools – but Automation Anywhere seems to agree with us, that this should not be the case. For when it comes to getting projects off the ground and augmenting the vital work of business analysts, Task Mining software brings a lot of bang for the buck.